Although one can never know what Meat Loaf won't do, IPL has drawn a clear line. Indianapolis last year approached the utility about converting more than 27,000 IPL-owned streetlights to efficient LED bulbs. IPL got on board, albeit reluctantly.

But when Indianapolis offered to acquire all of its streetlights — at a price of about $17 million, according to information provided through an IndyStar records request — IPL told the city to forget about it. No chance.

The reason, in short: there's shareholder value in them thar streetlights.

Indianapolis pays IPL, which is owned by Virginia-based AES Corp., about $4.5 million a year to operate and maintain its streetlights. That's big business, considering IPL receives a combined $5.5 million from all of its other municipal customers, which include Beech Grove, Carmel, Cumberland, Lawrence, Mooresville and Speedway.

The money from Indianapolis might have been a drop in IPL's bucket of $1.3 billion in total revenue last year, but it was too much annual income for IPL to let slip away.

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Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett along with IPL president and CEO Rafael Sanchez announced the plan to install the first 25 new street light as part of "Operation Night Light," a plan to address decades-old street light infrastructure. Phase one of they initiative calls for the addition of 100 new street across the city.(Photo11: Matt Kryger/IndyStar)

"We're in the business of providing energy solutions for our customers, and it is not in our strategic interest — we don't provide solutions by selling our assets," IPL CEO Rafael Sanchez told me when I asked about the city's desire to own its streetlights.

Indianapolis' current contract with the utility is set to expire at the end of the year. City officials think they could move faster toward LED if Indianapolis owned its streetlights.

"I think we probably would have gotten to this day, maybe, a little earlier, but who knows," Hogsett said of the city's LED announcement.

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Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett along and IPL CEO Rafael Sanchez, shown in an August 2016 photo, recently announced a new agreement that will convert the city's streetlights to LED.(Photo11: Matt Kryger/IndyStar)

But IPL's unwillingness to sell the streetlights essentially forced the city to negotiate a new contract. Walking away from IPL would have meant letting all of the city's streetlights go dark.

Thomas Cook, Hogsett's chief of staff, said the city considered a handful of alternatives, all of which were bad.

"The city, I guess, could have tried to install a new light pole six feet away from all the existing ones and gone to the (Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission) and asked to create our own utility," Cook said. "It's almost like a law school hypothetical. You could have put a bunch of people in the room and said, 'Technically, what are all of our options?' But we weren't willing to roll the dice on a key public safety infrastructure issue."

That left the city and IPL in an uncomfortable position: negotiating a precedent-setting LED conversion — IPL has never created a municipal rate model for LED streetlights — that neither side was excited about.

Indianapolis made its objective clear: The city wanted to convert 27,240 of its standard high-pressure sodium streetlights to LED without increasing its annual fees to IPL. Oh, and the city also wanted to install thousands of new streetlights without adding more spending to its budget.

"This really became a math problem," Sanchez said. "How do we solve the math problem for the city and make it economically viable for them to ... leave their bill relatively flat, but (while) being able to deploy additional streetlights?"

Under the deal reached between the city and IPL, Indianapolis is planning to spend $12 million out of a pot of local-income tax money that was released last year by the Indiana General Assembly to cover the three-year conversion to LED. As the city's streetlights begin operating more efficiently, the city expects to save enough money to add 4,000 new lights within six years.

Mackenzie Higgins, a project manager for the city who was involved in negotiations with IPL, said it amounts to the same approach the city might have taken if it had been able to buy its streetlights.

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"By paying for the up-front costs, it allows us to achieve the conversion for the same amount it would have cost us if we owned the lights," she said. "So, by paying the up-front costs as opposed to paying it as part of the rate, we're allowed to realize that (savings) and do the conversion for a cheaper amount."

In a significant concession for IPL, the utility agreed to share pricing data with the city on operating and maintaining the new LED lights — and IPL will reduce the city's price if the actual cost comes in lower than the annual $30-per-light that IPL is projecting.

That detail was negotiated largely because the city and IPL disagree over how much cheaper it will be to operate LED lights. City officials think the savings could be so great that Indianapolis could exceed its planned 4,000 new streetlights in the coming years.

The pending contract, which is subject to approval by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission and the City-County Council, is not exactly the deal anyone wanted. IPL likely will be asked to make more concessions to other cities, and Indianapolis has little chance of ever taking control of streetlights.

"These negotiations have been going on for some time, so you have to consider that. That's lost time," Hogsett said. "But an agreement of this nature is not something that is easily reached for anybody. So we — and I think IPL probably felt the same way — we'd rather take the time to fully understand each other's positions, each other's priorities, each other's pressure points and get it right rather than cobble together an agreement that may have gotten it done faster, but maybe not quite as well or as efficiently."

After a year of talks that oscillated between contentious and productive, the city's relationship with IPL persists. As Meat Loaf wrote, "there'll never be no turning back."

Call IndyStar business columnist James Briggs at (317) 444-6307. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesEBriggs.